Page 2
Fighting For a Fair Risk-Free Austerity Budget From November 2011 to January 2014
March 4, 2018, 9pm
March 4, 2018, 9pm
Barry Drogin, EE '83, Publisher
Don Toman, EE '55, Christine Moh, A '95,
Leslie Martinez, A '08, Emily Martinez, AR '11, Contributors
Gerald Soloway, EE '69, Matthew Arnold, AR '82, Staff
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As a final show of good faith – with the uncertainty of large unreimbursed surgical bills still hanging over my head – I gave a large sum of money to the Annual Fund under the Free Since 1859 campaign, and I did everything I could to urge others to do so. I will remain proud of being a Cooper Union alumnus, as someone who attended the college "when it was free." I will be sponsoring an annual trip to Peter Cooper’s grave, on the third Sunday of every April, to watch him spin. I am not going to direct funding to the engineering school, the art school, or the architecture school, or give money to the Annual Fund or the Capital Campaign. But I am going to find some way to keep the Library, its librarians, and the digitization of the Cooper Archives alive. The trustees have killed off Peter Cooper’s legacy, but I will not let them kill off the truth about who Peter Cooper was and what The Cooper Union was. That is my exit pledge.
Read the entire post-mortem here.
Barry Drogin BEE ’83 MEE ‘86
Publisher, The Alumni Pioneer News Archive
The Alumni Pioneer was a virtual newspaper with breaking news stories and links to analyses, sources and the media. It is now an archive.
Some personal musings by Barry Drogin after January 12, 2014, can be found here.
$40M isn't that much money, especially not when you're sitting on over $500M in real estate. In the grand game of "what if?" and hindsight, pointing to the failure of each of the six components of the Master Plan as the cause of the Cooper Union financial crisis has always been the preference of those with a personal philosophy of what's wrong with The Cooper Union, with higher education, or with the country as a whole. But the fact is, if just one of those six components hadn't failed - if we just had another $40M (give or take $10M) sitting in our endowment - Robert Bernhard wouldn't be struggling so hard to divert attention from the failure of his Master Plan, because there wouldn't be much of a financial crisis at all, and the Board could have kept lying to the alumni, the students, the faculty, and the world.
The over-investment in hedge funds in 2008? John Michaelson can switch to percentages all he wants, but the loss of over $30M in the crash would have left enough cash in the coffers to eliminate the need for a cover-up.
Move from 51 Astor Place over to the site of the old Hewitt Building? The delay in the construction of 51 Astor Place, and the decision of NYC Finance to cut the PILOT on the site to 50%, cost Cooper $2M per year - at 5% interest, the equivalent of $40M.
The Capital Campaign? Not only did it fall $50M short of its goal, but another $40M is in bequests - money Cooper won't collect until the donors die.
The Annual Fund? Here's where the accounting gets so fishy, because, after 2000, large gifts are automatically diverted from the Annual Fund to the Capital Campaign, either to the Building Fund or into the unrestricted endowment. Resources are diverted from small donors - the annual Dinner Dance actually loses money, while Urban Visionaries is more and more successful each year - and - except for the Phonathon - most alumni mailings concentrate on the Building Fund, not the Annual Fund. The takeaway is that alumni participation in The Annual Fund undoubtedly didn't drop from 40% to 20%, and that Annual Fund giving may well have risen from $2M/year to $4M/year - again, equivalent to $40M - if Campbell & Co. hadn't decided to de-emphasize small-donor giving.
The New Academic Building? The rush to build - paired with the actual cost of Foundation Building renovations - went over-budget by at least $40M, much more depending on how far back you go in the history of cost estimates. That Cooper ended up with less square footage, that there is an untold story of the fight to get the "modern" building to support modern educational telecommunications, and that, despite the energy savings, the annual cost of running the building is apparently higher than running the two buildings it replaced, only adds to the burn, which is why it is a favorite whipping boy of most critics.
Finally, the rising cost of higher education? The Master Plan called for reductions in the operating budgets, but this isn't possible in an enviroment where secretaries are laid off and replaced with higher-paid assistant directors and directors, all with benefits. The empire building - which extended to the Board of Trustees themselves and their high-priced support staff, lawyers, hedge fund managers, real estate brokers, bankers, and the like - easily added $40M in losses to Cooper's bottom line in the past decade, if not in the past four years alone.
Why $40M? That's enough to get Cooper to 2018, as this analysis shows. Six times $40M? That's a quarter of a billion dollars, or half the value of Cooper's real estate portfolio. That much loss cannot be covered up. But that's why the Cooper Union Board of Trustees would rather the world not know the names Robert Bernhard, Ron Drucker, Mark Epstein, William Sandholm, John Michaelson, or Sandra Priest Rose. Much preferable to pay over a half million dollars per year to folks like Dr. George Campbell and Dr. Jamshed Bharucha to take the heat and act like they are in charge.
Quarter billion cover-up? More like a quarter billion fuck up.
Fan Mail
The Alumni Pioneer also established this Facebook policy on December 18, 2012. Now that it is an archive, alumni are asked to please refrain from communicating directly with the publisher about Cooper matters.
Info about this website: Not Nice Music went out of business in 2008. Cassandra's Curse is one of several Internet Books available on the Not Nice Music website, in addition to some other special collections, such as the September 11 Page. Aside from being an archive, the Not Nice Music website is currently primarily a fan site for the Publisher's young son, who has a full-tuition scholarship to the National Dance Institute program (see, there is free after-school education for elementary and middle school students, too!). This content is not a publicity stunt for Not Nice Music or Cassandra's Curse.
Info about the publisher: Here's a Cooper-focused page about the Publisher of The Alumni Pioneer.
This editorial is slightly updated from the version printed on April 10, 2012.
In March of 2012, Jon Stewart of The Daily Show joked about Obama’s vocal support of a Libya no-fly zone, “Mr President, you don’t even think enough of us to lie to us.” We know that our leaders have to make hard decisions, and we prefer it when they stretch the truth to make us feel better about compromises or deals. If you play golf with the President, you give him a mulligan.
The president of The Cooper Union is not elected, he is paid a salary that is demonstrably too high and tasked with convincing wealthy philanthropists to donate money and with overseeing a staff, budget, and investment portfolio that will ensure the college’s continued existence. Cooper presidents have typically kept their distance from most faculty, staff, students, and alumni and, as long as Cooper continued its mission and its excellence, everyone was comfortable with the chain-of-command. Jamshed Bharucha came to Cooper with an academic agenda and was faced with a financial crisis he didn’t cause. Under normal circumstances, the president would have replaced top management with a staff of his own picking, instituted some tough changes, and been forgotten along with other former Cooper presidents.
The Alumni Pioneer has taken the position that Jamshed Bharucha is a symptom of the problem, not a route to the solution. We understand that Bharucha has endeared himself to many, but when the Board reverses its announcement of tuition at Cooper and finally enforces an austerity budget at Cooper (the austerity budget we were promised at the end of 2008 that was ignored for three years under Bharucha’s predecessor), it will be a shock if Bharucha is remembered in a decade as the president who saved The Cooper Union. Consider his record:
The Alumni Pioneer sincerely hopes that the tuition freight train is derailed, and that The Cooper Union will emerge from this financial crisis with its mission and its excellence intact. We understand that, by taking a public anti-Bharucha stance, we may have alienated some members of the community who, for whatever reason, like Bharucha. But, in our opinion, and for the reasons stated, we feel Jamshed Bharucha ran out of mulligans a long time ago, and this website will remain as a corrective to future Cooper historians.
Page One / Cooper Pioneer / Top / Editorial/Links/Mail / Media/Historical / Alumni / Page 2 Fare / Webcomics
12-03-2012 to now: C.U.$.O.$. maintains a press page at http://cusos.org/press/
09-04-2012 The Listserve: Cooper professor tells 21,000 people about Peter Cooper and The Cooper Union
07-16-2012 WNYC News Blog: Quotes Publisher that providing scholarships only to those in financial need may destroy relationship of alumni to college
07-13-2012 NPR Planet Money Podcast: How institutions can never recover from a categorical change of charging for what was free
07-06-2012 Huffington Post: Puts Cooper at center of higher education crisis
06-21-2012 Dissent: Links free education and 1T day to CU in the news
05-09-2012 The Villager: Concerned faculty, students, alumni
05-03-2012 The Villager: The Way Forward
04-26-2012 Pensions & Investments: Michaelson: If you charge tuition, don't blame me
04-25-2012 WNYC News Blog: Grad students pay for undergrads an "iffy experiment"
04-25-2012 The Gothamist,
NY1,
The New York Times,
GalleristNY: OWS marches from Union Square to Cooper Square, ends in arrest on statue
04-25-2012 Reuters: Administration can't be trusted
04-24-2012 AP News Wire: Sensational Headline
04-24-2012 The Wall Street Journal: Board approved week ago
04-24-2012 The New York Times*: Hybrid framework
04-17-2012 Real Estate Weekly,
NY Observer,
The New York Times,
The Chronicle of Higher Education: The Gothamist punked
04-16-2012 The Gothamist: Blog punked by fake "Cooper to lease NAB to NYU" website
03-22-2012 The Villager: Bharucha Reinvention Strategy cited
03-08-2012 The Villager: Alumni President uses "conspiracy theory" stereotype
02-23-2012 The Villager: Talking Point: Save The Cooper Union without losing its identity
02-07-2012 The Local: Balloon protest at wreath-laying ceremony
01-11-2012 The Village Voice: Cooper remaining tuition-free deemed "inevitable"
12-19-2011 Bloomberg: Good luck, Revenue Task Force: Cornell and Technion to put engineering campus on Roosevelt Island without borrowing
12-16-2011 Capital: Describes shock of crisis to community, extensive Degen and Slavin quotes
12-16-2011 The Villager: Local newspaper continues to follow story, covering the Presidential Address
12-11-2011 Brooklyn Rail: Adjunct professor describes inherent value of education, sums it all up in must-read
12-09-2011 The College of 2020: Bharucha says teaching should be more interactive and interdisciplinary
12-08-2011 The Villager: Front page story in local newspaper gets coverage of Community Summit right
12-07-2011 The Village Voice: Calls free tuition quaint, cites Chrysler Building rent canard
12-05-2011 The Chronicle of Higher Education: In 2009, Campbell in top ten salary of 519 private colleges with budgets over $50M
11-30-2011 Vanishing New York: Blog coverage with photos of "On The Table" exhibition
11-30-2011 The New School Free Press: Great coverage including interviews with many, including former Board Chair Michalis
11-27-2011 The Chronicle of Higher Education: Campbell considers full-tuition scholarship Cooper's historic mission
11-10-2011 The Villager: Editorial says charge full-tuition to 400 well-to-do families from 900 student body
11-10-2011 The Villager: Bharucha increases deficit by $30K
11-10-2011 The Villager: Boos, applause, and anticipated future actions
11-10-2011 VV Blog: Faculty question crisis
11-09-2011 Reuters Blog: Calls finances murky
11-08-2011 NY Times*: Campbell Letter to the Editor
11-08-2011 NY Times*: Campbell confirms ongoing consideration of charging tuition
11-08-2011 The Local: Board blames alumni
11-07-2011 Art in America: Bharucha says Revenue Task Force will report in Spring 2012
11-04-2011 WNYC News Blog: Historian Buckley reinforces Peter Cooper belief in free education
11-03-2011 DNAInfo: Bharucha listens as students demand tuition be taken off table
11-02-2011 Vimeo: Video interviews with students, faculty, alumna
11-02-2011 VV Blog: 100 students walk out of class
11-02-2011 NY1: Student Walkout
11-02-2011 NY1: Bharucha interview
11-01-2011 Huffington Post: Rehash supplemented by link to $35K tuition figure
11-01-2011 VV Blog: Wouldn't effect current or future low-income students
10-31-2011 NY Times*: Revenue Task Force
04-20-2010 NY Times*: Fact check, please! Campbell, announcing retirement, claims 2008 balanced budget, first in decades
06-30-2009 CNBC: Michaelson, head of trustee investment committee, claims Cooper did not do risky hedge funds
06-30-2009 WSJ: Cooper Sidesteps 2009 Crisis
06-18-2009 The Chronicle of Higher Education: Olin temporarily goes to 50% tuition for "sustainable financial model"
12-31-2007 New York Observer: Cooper pays $1M to sell Engineering Building, keeps space for eventual move of administrative offices
02-11-1997 NY Times* Trustees Ousted for Neglect of Fiduciary Duty of Care
*New York Times articles may only be available to non-subscribers for a limited time.
Volume 93, mini #6 - Two Weeks of Leaks
'79-'80 Cooper Finances and Student Fees Cover Renovation Debt
Student Lou Lipson AR '13 scanned these pages from the Spring 1971 At Cooper Union and posted them to As Free As Air and Water, but the link has problems, so The Alumni Pioneer is making it available on its website. It is a 5MB PDF and concerns the drastic measures The Cooper Union took in the 70's to keep afloat.
Most interesting is a quote from an Engineers' Council for Professional Development (ECPD) 1964 report (now ABET) cautioning against "permitting graduate work to drain strength from the undergraduate program because of the unusual demands on the few members of the staff qualified to work with graduate students.... The curriculum is satisfactory but not outstanding."
The Alumni Pioneer has scanned and posted this history compiled by assistant librarian Weimer-Vogl and published in a special Spring/Summer issue of At Cooper Union in celebration of the 125th anniversary of the school. Additional important issues of "At Cooper Union" are available as follows:
The Cooper Union has also tried to hide this report from Board of Trustees Chairman Ronald W. Drucker from 2007.
Peter Cooper may have helped found the B&O Railroad and lay the transatlantic cable, but his son-in-law, Abram Hewitt - a New York City mayor and U.S. congressman - made Penn Station possible. Read a profile of the man who talked Andrew Carnegie into giving $300K to The Cooper Union and claimed that Peter Cooper said that education should be "as free as air and water" - or coined the phrase himself.
There are several websites which, once set up, are self-running. But these alumni have gone out of their way to give time to the cause.
Karina Tipton Moderates alumni LinkedIn group and Cooper Union Commons
Sean Cusack Tweets meetings and links, created Cooper Union Task Force and wiki
Rocco Cetera Long-time organizer of alumni events
Kerry CarnahanRecent issues of The Cooper Pioneer
Volume 93, mini #5 - Common Ground
Volume 93, mini #4 - Art Portfolio Previews
Volume 93, mini #3 - Urban Guerilla Warfare Lecture
Volume 93, mini #2 - Panel on Surveillance
Volume 93, mini #1 - Free Cooper Union General Meeting
Cooper Pioneer in absentia - Special Alumni Pioneer edition
Volume 92, mini #3 - Computer Center budget cuts
Volume 92, mini #2 - Bharucha Q&A on undergradaute (and graduate) tuition
Volume 92, mini #1 - undergraduate tuition subcommittee
Volume 91, May - The Way Forward, The Walkout, lots more
Volume 91, mini #12 - HS Tutoring Club
Volume 91, mini #11.5 - April Fools issue
Volume 91, mini #11 - FOCUS Group Session
Volume 91, Spring - Animal Farm, Revenue Task Force
Volume 91, mini #10 - Work Makes Work 2, library debate
Volume 91, mini #9 - FOCU Pin-Up, Work Makes Work 1
Volume 91, mini #8 - Toby Cumberbach calls for open and transparent discussion
Volume 91, February - wreath laying ceremony protest, Work Makes Work exhibition, ESC open meeting.
Volume 91, mini #7 - management salaries, donation campaign, and interview with Revenue Task Force rep.
Volume 91, mini #6 - coverage of breakout session #3, the student donation campaign, the hiring freeze, and the Revenue Task Force.
Volume 91, mini #5 - picks up on Alumni Pioneer front-pager about hiring freeze violations, cites faculty outrage and cost of job search firm.
Volume 91, #5 - 23-page "unity" issue includes student coverage of Community Summit, editorial eloquently comparing dark clouds of finals to dark clouds obscuring unity over taking tuition off the table, coverage of On The Table exhibition, more.
Volume 91, mini #4 - includes highlights from an interview with Jamshed Bharucha, and coverage of a second Joint Student assembly.
Volume 91, mini #3 - includes highlights from the Open Forum with Mark Epstein, and coverage of a Joint Student Council meeting that followed after.
Volume 91, mini #2 - includes a front-page summary of the ESC Open Forum (what The Alumni Pioneer now calls "the Halloween Massacre"), reports on the Walk-Work-Act-Out and a silent demonstration in front of the Art Dean's office, a political cartoon, and notices of upcoming meetingsHistorical Cooper Pioneer Articles
'80-'81 Cooper Finances
'81-'82 Cooper Finances
Board of Trustees Rejects Proposed 1982-1983 Budget
Board Chairman Letter on Access to Meetings
'82-'83 Cooper Finances
1980 - The Death of Apathy
1981 - Who Writes the Pioneer?
1986 - 65th Anniversary Mastheads
Historical At Cooper Union issues
Continuing Ed, 2002
Campbell, Summer 2007
Toman, Summer 2007
Campbell, Summer 2008
Bee, Summer 2008
Campbell, Winter 2008
Bee, Winter 2008
Campbell, Summer 2009
Bee, Summer 2009
Campbell, Winter 2009
Bee, Winter 2009Historical Abram Steven Hewitt portrait
The Gang of Six
Organizer, FREE COOPER UNION! A Community Summit
Henry Chapman, A '11
The force behind the Save Cooper Union Without Tuition petition
Xenia Diente
The brains behind the outfit, rumored to have undue influence on Rocco
Top speakers at the Community Summit. Click on their pictures to see YouTube videos of their presentations.
Kevin Slavin, A '95, Transparency
Ben Degen, A '98, Guiding Principles
David Gersten, AR '91, Removing Barriers
Barry Drogin, EE '83, Revenue and Analysis
Richard Stock, Professor, Overview of Expenses
Peter Buckley, Associate Professor, Institutional Governance
April 26, 2012: Rocco Cetera CE '99, Richard Stock (faculty), Sarah Crowe A '12, Day Gleeson (faculty), Yuri Masnyj A '98, Litia Perta (faculty), Toby Cumberbatch (faculty), Peter Buckley (faculty), David Gersten AR '91, Sangu Iyer CE '99, Karina Tipton CE '99, Tom Synott (faculty), John Leeper AR '85 (Friends of Cooper Union)
December 9, 2012: Victoria Sobel, Jakob Biernat, Tyler Berrier, Tyler Paige, Kristi Cavataro, Jon Cuba, Peter Cooper, Aaron Fowler, Josiah Ellis, Joe Riley, Aaron Graham, Casey Gollan (The Cooper 11)
May 8, 2013 Sit-In: To help provide suppers to the students occupying the President's Office, provide money at Occupy Cooper: Alumni Dinners.
Page 2 features lighter (but no less serious) fare: a "translation" of Bharucha's Back-to-School e-mail, a poem by Barry Drogin, a collection of Alumni Pioneer nicknames, a collection of professorial quotes from The Cooper Pioneer, and the mysterious Rosebud, plus games and funny papers. Enjoy!
Click for larger pictures
Stephen Doyle's Foundation Building with Penguins, circa 1980 |
Alyssa Davis's New Academic Building, 2012 |
 It's a lemon! |
 Do Not Shake! |
Free, by Scott Lerman A '81 (click for full image) |
FUNNY PAPERS
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On December 5, we met in a summit to ensure a free Cooper Union.
I am no more intelligent, motivated, or creative than anyone else in the Cooper Union Community. Cooper Union students have been, are, and will be the most valuable and valued asset of this school. The faculty have been, are, and will be the most self-sacrificing, knowledgable, and forward-thinking educators in the country. The alumni have been, are, and will be the most generous, professional, and devoted alumni of any alumni in the world. Let no one doubt the excellence of these students. Let no one question the wisdom of this faculty. And let no one underestimate or plan on these alumni to not rally around the institution that was, that is, and that will be The Cooper Union. - Barry Drogin, written 12/2/2011, mic check Peter Cooper park 12/7/2012, Washington Square Park 12/8/2012
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Cassandra's Curse Copyright © 1993, 1996, 2007, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2018 by Barry Drogin - All rights reserved
